Should America enter the war and lose it, the Jews in the United States will undergo anti-Jewish outbreaks which “will surpass those in Nazi Germany.” Such is the opinion of Col. Charles Lindbergh as reported in this week’s issue of Life magazine by Roger Butterfield.
“Lindbergh,” Mr. Butterfield writes, “has told more than one close friend that participation in the war against Hitler is sure to cause an internal explosion, a bloody revolution in America. Organized labor, he predicts, will pull in one direction and profiteering capital in the other, splitting the country in two. But it is our national morale that arouses his blackest pessimism. American defeats and the death in battle or by drowning of “millions” of young American soldiers will be followed, he has said to friends, by upheavals of great violence in the nation. He is especially concerned with the effect such disasters would have on Jews in the U.S. He believes Jews will be blamed for American entry into the war and will suffer for it. If that happens, he has said, the anti-Jewish outbreaks that will occur here will surpass those in Nazi Germany, for Americans are “more violent” than Germans.
Yet Lindbergh is not anti-Semitic, Mr. Butterfield continues. In personal conversation he has expressed indignation over the German treatment of Jews in Europe. But he has never condemned the persecutions publicly, in any of the 18 speeches and articles he has written on world affairs since September 1939. Several friends and associates have pleaded with him to do so, and he has invariably refused. His usual answer is, “I must be neutral.” In dinner-table conversations he sometimes goes further. “Look here,” he said to one who raised this subject, “Germany since the last war has been going through a revolution. Compared with the Russian and Spanish revolutions, or even our own Civil War which might have been called a revolution, this German affair has been pretty orderly.”
“Orderly” is a favorite Lindbergh word in discussing Germany, Mr. Butterfield explains.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
